The Well-Tempered Wok

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: February 9, 2005

WHEN Grace Young's family went to restaurants, her father always insisted that they sit right next to the swinging door to the kitchen. A liquor salesman who felt at home in every restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown, her father said food had to be eaten just moments out of the wok, while it is still fresh, hot and exuding wok hay, a Cantonese term, unknown in other parts of China, that translates loosely as ''wok energy'' or ''wok breath.''

Wok hay is what happens when excellent ingredients -- like ginger, noodles, shrimp, walnuts or Chinese chives -- meet a wok crackling with heat. It is both a taste and aroma and something else, too, a lively freshness that prickles your nose and makes you impatient for that first taste, like the smell of steak just off the grill or a tomato right off the vine in August. Food with wok hay tastes intensely of itself.

''Wok hay makes the difference between a good stir-fry and a great one,'' said Ms. Young, who traveled to China in 2000 and 2002 to study and document wok cooking and traditions. Her book, ''The Breath of a Wok'' (Simon & Schuster, 2004), is both an attempt to define wok hay and a guide to achieving it in an American kitchen. ''It's something that you create with a hot wok,'' Ms. Young said, ''but it's also something you release that is already in the food.''

Today is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a 15-day celebration of renewal, which is the most important holiday of the Chinese year: Christmas, New Year's Day, Easter and Yom Kippur all bundled together. It is considered the most auspicious time to buy a new wok or other cooking tools. ''The weeks leading up to New Year are our busiest time of the year,'' said Tanya Leung, an owner of Hung Chong Cookware in Chinatown in Manhattan. This year, she said, many of her customers are buying a new product, an iron adapter for American stovetops that makes it possible to use an authentic Chinese wok without raising it too high above the flames, as wok rings do.

Lang Ching, a New Yorker born in Fujian Province, who was browsing the aisles there last week, said she buys a new wok every year. ''Some cooks in China keep their woks for 30 years,'' she said. ''But I like to try the new ones.'' Cookware centers like Hung Chong and Sunrise, on Main Street in Flushing, Queens, carry both the ancient forms of the wok -- southern Chinese cast iron ones with two handles, northern Chinese carbon steel ones with one hollow handle -- and popular, more expensive innovations like nonstick and anodized aluminum woks.

But Ms. Young said that just as Western skillets with those surfaces will never produce the kind of browning that cooks dream of, the newfangled woks will never produce wok hay, especially on an American stove. On a typical Chinese stove the wok rests inside the heat source, so that its entire base is bathed in flames. Recreating that embrace of heat through a series of subtle changes to traditional Chinese methods is, she said, the key to stir-fry success.

Missteps that prevent us from achieving wok hay, Ms. Young said, include crowding too much food into the wok, using ingredients that are damp instead of dry, and adding the oil before the wok is heated through. But, she said, ''the single most common mistake made in cooking Chinese food on a Western stove is using a wok that is not hot enough.''

Residential stoves here produce about 10,000 B.T.U.'s, but restaurant stoves in Hong Kong, where the chefs use compressed gas to create a more intense heat, can produce as much as 200,000. At that level of heat, and with the intense activity of a restaurant kitchen, even top-quality woks warp instantly and have to be hammered back into shape after each night's cooking. While a home wok can last a lifetime, the legendary wok warriors of top Hong Kong restaurants must buy new woks every 7 to 10 days. The best chefs buy their woks from artisans who hammer each one from a single piece of carbon steel, positioning each strike of the hammer to create a perfectly smooth cooking surface.

Those chefs, Ms. Young said, would be mystified by some of the advice she gives to home cooks in the United States. ''The flat-bottom wok is totally unknown in China'' she said. ''But it's absolutely the right choice here.'' She said that even her grandmother, who immigrated to San Francisco from Hong Kong in 1979, never attempted wok cooking on an American stove. All of the family's recipes were adapted to skillets, Ms. Young said, but the results were never quite satisfactory. ''You end up chasing the ingredients around,'' she explained. ''Only the wok shape lets you cook on the bottom and the sides of the pan.''

Last week at Hung Chong, Ms. Leung's assistant Meng Chaeng helped a customer choose a new cast-iron wok -- thinner than American cast iron and not at all heavy -- by gently thumping the sides of several contenders with a gloved finger and listening to the bell-like tones that echoed in the shop. Mr. Chaeng is the shop's resident expert at listening to woks.

''This is the most beautiful one,'' he said, pointing to a wok with a chipped edge. ''It will give you the most wok hay.''